Bench Warmer

Seems intresting , I've always been a big fan of GTA games so I cant wait till it comes out

The trailer you see above is for a game called "1979" in the works from iNK Stories. The idea is to create an open-world, Grand Theft Auto style game set during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. I don't know about you, but I'm already on-board.​

The game is the brainchild of Navid Khonsari, the director of cinematics for some of the best video games ever created. He worked at Rockstar between 2001 and 2005, working on basically every classic game the company made during that time. He then moved on to found iNK Stories, the company that created the cinematics for Alan Wake and Homefront. So this isn't just some dude with an idea; it's a AAA video game insider with a potentially revolutionary idea.
The game aims to combine open-world elements with what Khonsari calls a "baton-pass" narrative. The game will explore the Iranian Revolution through the perspectives of several playable characters. An ambitious challenge, both artistically and culturally.
The player begins the game as an American/Iranian translator on a mission to rescue the hostages held at the American embassy. You decide whether to buzz into Iran, Seal Team 6 style, with helicopters, by joining up with Saddam Hussein's army, or to cross the Afghanistan border with the help of the Taliban -- remember, at this time, both of these enemies were "friends" of the United States.
So far, so good, but here's where it gets trickier: You then take on the role of an Iranian protester, unhappy with the extremist elements that have taken over the movement to oust the Shah. The early levels are standard third-person shooter, but then, Khonsari says, the gameplay shifts to include "morally ambiguous elements of diplomacy, stealth and bartering." Each time you take on a new character, the style of gameplay changes. Some characters will focus action, while others will feature vehicles and puzzle-solving.
The gameplay sounds challenging, but the response to the game might be even more of an issue.
"Iranians are going to criticize me because I'm making a game that 'promotes American imperialists going in and shooting Iranians...Americans are going to criticize me because I'm making a game that 'glorifies Islamic fundamentalism,' or something. I'm not going to please everyone, and the point of the game isn't to do that," Khonsari said.
"People who might not be completely familiar with the game world look at fancy graphics and polished gameplay and say 'this is cutting edge,' " Khonsari told CNN. "But from what I've seen, it's still quite basic. Very much a checkers mentality -- red against black, good against evil. I'm interested in having good and evil within the same character, and for you to experience both. I think that's true to life, and I think you can design a game around that, too."
The cultural minefield this game walks is amazing, but this is exactly the kind of story that can best be told through a game, and, just maybe, if a publisher is found who is courageous enough to release it, we'll be all be able to judge for ourselves how we would have reacted during the Iranian Revolution.
I can only hope Jimmy Carter makes an appearance as a playable character

Administrator, Technical Team Director

(CNN) -- Vice City. San Andreas. Liberty City. Tehran.
Three of these locales are instantly familiar to videogame diehards as settings in the "Grand Theft Auto" series, which has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. The latter, however, is more commonly linked to news bulletins about the Iranian nuclear program or confrontational statements by the country's hardline Islamist president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

If Navid Khonsari, 41, has his way, Iran's capital city will soon be much more familiar to gamers. A director of the "Grand Theft Auto" series, the Iranian-born Khonsari's next game has a simple working title whose numerals denote a world of significance: "1979." And the game's tagline? "There are no good guys."

"1979" gets its name from the year when the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran began, which was during the height of Iran's Islamic Revolution. That year marked the overthrow of the dictator, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, by a populist revolt and the subsequent installation of a fundamentalist Islamic state.

The game aims to combine some sandbox, open-world elements popularized by "Grand Theft Auto" with what Khonsari calls a "baton-pass" narrative, which explores this historic backdrop through the sequential perspectives of several playable characters.

Khonsari has an ideal pedigree for an undertaking this ambitious: Besides creating a raft of iconic and genre-defining games, he also grew up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.

"I want people to understand the incredible moral ambiguity of this story, that this was a country with many different ideas and beliefs," Khonsari said in an exclusive interview with CNN. "Growing up in Iran when I did, I saw Iranians in the greatest light, and I saw them in the worst light."

Shortly after the fall of the shah, Khonsari's family fled Iran for Canada. Khonsari moved to the West Coast as an adult to pursue a career as a filmmaker. He later moved to New York City and applied his talents to an up-and-coming studio named Rockstar Games.

"I was the cinematic director for 'GTA 3,' 'Vice City' and 'San Andreas,' as well as the two Max Payne games, 'Red Dead Revolver' and 'Bully,' " he said. "Anything that came out through Rockstar between 2001 and 2005, I was fortunate enough to be involved in.

"My main job, and what grew into my current passion, was bringing that cinematic 'feel' to video games."

After he left Rockstar, Khonsari founded his own game-production company, iNKstories, which he co-runs with his wife, Vassiliki. The duo already have two blockbuster titles under their belt, "Alan Wake" and "Homefront." They aim for "1979" to be the third.

The gameplay of '1979'At the game's outset, the player is an American/Iranian translator on a mission to rescue the embassy hostages. The player must choose one of three historically inspired ways to enter Iran: By helicopter with a U.S. special forces team, through the Iraq border with Saddam Hussein's army or across the Afghanistan border with the Taliban.
In these preliminary levels, the game plays as a fairly standard third-person shooter, with some linguistic puzzles that will test your character's imperfect mastery of the Farsi language.

"But once you get into Iran, you're no longer the translator," he said. "You take the role of a student demonstrator who was opposed the shah. You've kicked the shah out, but you're unhappy with some of these fanatical elements you see rising up.

"So the game changes, and now your mission is to get this small military group to Tehran, but nonviolently, clandestinely. You want the American hostages out of Iran because you want the country to focus on rebuilding itself, and you've heard all these rumors about a war with Iraq coming."

This, Khonsari explains, is where gameplay shifts to include some morally ambiguous elements of diplomacy, stealth and bartering. Each time the baton passes to a new character, the style of gameplay changes, too. Some characters will focus more on action, while others will feature vehicles and puzzle-solving.

"Not everyone you meet is going to be helpful," he said. "There are going to be aspects of bribery, making exchanges and turning a blind eye to really bad stuff so you can get the job done.

"Maybe, in order to get the group there, you need to sacrifice some stragglers and let them get captured so the others can get away. And then you'll have some extreme choices to make when you get to Tehran: Are you going to invade the embassy, guns blazing, to try to get the hostages back? Or are you going to try to protect the embassy from the Americans?

"People who might not be completely familiar with the game world look at fancy graphics and polished gameplay and say 'this is cutting edge,' " he continued. "But from what I've seen, it's still quite basic. Very much a checkers mentality -- red against black, good against evil. I'm interested in having good and evil within the same character, and for you to experience both. I think that's true to life, and I think you can design a game around that, too."

A multiplayer version is also in the works, with 12 maps planned for release. The multiplayer modes will feature differing combinations of straightforward gun combat with ruthless negotiation and decision-making.

First in a franchise?Though the game is still in the alpha stage of development and at least a year and a half away from release, Khonsari hopes the success of "1979" will breed a franchise of similar games.

"(This is) the first installment of a franchise where the games will be named after years in which there were CIA operations within certain countries," he said. " '1979' is the first one because it's closest to my heart and I know the story the best. After that, we want to explore what took place in Panama with (Manuel) Noriega, and Libya back in the '70s and '80s with (Moammar) Gadhafi."

Khonsari's heritage is one reason he's not concerned with political correctness in his treatment of one of the United States' supposedly implacable enemies.

"Iranians are going to criticize me because I'm making a game that 'promotes American imperialists going in and shooting Iranians,' " he said. "Americans are going to criticize me because I'm making a game that 'glorifies Islamic fundamentalism,' or something. I'm not going to please everyone, and the point of the game isn't to do that.

"I think that being able to base a game in contemporary historical truths is significant, besides being educational," he said. "It opens people's eyes to look beyond what they're reading in the paper and realize that there's a definite relationship between history and the headlines.

"Most of the people who are playing games nowadays were born after 1980 -- after the Iranian Revolution. People are so quick to accept the official record of things as 'history,' without examining everything that's gone on in the last 40, 50, 60 years. It's important we remember these things, and work to keep them relevant."

A screen shot from Seven Quests shows a battle with the hero, Rostam, and his troops. The game is based on a 1,000-year-old Iranian poem.

Courtesy of Gameguise

It's estimated that there are 20 million gamers in Iran, where half the population is under 25 years old. Last year, the Obama administration eased sanctions on Internet services in Iran, giving a boost to the game market.Two entrepreneurs with Iranian roots hope to make an international splash with their new game, Seven Quests. The online multiplayer game is an update of a 1,000-year-old Iranian poem, the "Shahnameh," or the "epic of the kings."The hero is Rostam, the Persian version of Hercules.

"It's our hero — it's our Iranian national hero. It's our mythological symbol for a warrior who conquers all evil," says Amir-Esmaeil Bozorgzadeh, who heads a game development company based in Dubai.Bozorgzadeh is creating the Seven Quests game for an international online game market, but he's also aiming at Iran's huge gaming community where everyone already knows the story."Markets like Iran are filled with some of the most hard-core gamers the world's ever seen," he says.Seven Quests is a traditional war game, but it's not just about shooting stuff. This violence has a twist."You're going to see him battling a three-headed dog, or a 10-headed snake," Bozorgzadeh says. "That's the cool thing about mythology is that it's usually not so much centered between humans versus humans, but humans versus monsters."

iThe developers of Seven Quests hope the game will have international appeal as well as offer a channel for Iranians to connect with the world after decades of isolation.

Courtesy of Gameguise

Battling online monsters wasn't exactly the goal of Washington policy when sanctions that limited Iranian access to Internet services were lifted in 2013. The point was to help Iranians to freely communicate on social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The Iranian government still blocks those services, but online games are the success story — an open channel of communication."And when you have a game that is filled with real-time players and dynamics, and people are making alliances and people are making enemies but they're working together, in their chats and forums, everyone is interacting, it's very compelling," Bozorgzadeh says.Compelling, says Hossein Jalali, to finally connect with the world after decades of isolation. Jalali is a partner in the development team and is passionate about multiplayer games because he grew up playing them in Iran."We've been playing games within our own realm for so long, and then suddenly you have the opportunity to play with the world, so it's a fascinating situation," he says.Jalali is the tech guy, and to build a complex game that looks good on smartphones, his team has turned to a company that's already produced hit games in the Middle East for a billion-dollar market.The team holds tech meetings via Skype with the offices of Falafel Games in Hangzhou, China. Radwan Kasmiya, a Syrian, moved his development company to China's technology hub. He says Seven Quests is kind of like falafel, the popular Middle East snack — a familiar taste for Iranians and a new treat for an international audience."This is what we think our message within our game," Kasmiya says. "We are creating something delicious, affordable for everybody, and it can go across borders. Hopefully, many of them would like it and would keep consuming it."That's the hope when the game launches in a few months, first in English and then in Farsi, says Jalali."We're hoping for millions of people to play," he says. "It's got a great story behind it. ... Everyone in Iran actually has heard this story from their parents or from school, so obviously if we get positive feedback from them, it will be excellent."Excellent, he says, if Iranians open another channel to talk to the world. And if international gamers learn a little about Iranian culture, that would be excellent, too.

Legionnaire

Totally agree, outside of Iran for sure, Europe or USA etc. Looks like an old fashioned Call Of Duty type game. I do not mind these games but I find that real life shooting is way more fun and Nevada has some pretty awesome gun laws(lol). My forte are sports games to tell you the truth so if I play that game, I would probably just go through the motions. My favorites are Madden(although not as good as it was before they tailored it to the novice player), FIFA(fun if you play on the correct mode like professional and up against friends, otherwise you can use Messi or CR7 and destroy people) and NBA 2k. That is a different set up than EA and it is all about timing. I make good money on the side playing my friends on NBA 2K because I can hit between 75-80% of my 3's. In real life I am good in shooting but in video games I am just average. I suppose we all have our strengths and weaknesses comrade. I also am pretty decent in fighting games and RPG or action RPG games but again I am not that much of a nerd so I stay away from those games. Tell me what you think and I might try it out as well and give an input. I think it is good to get a controller that can stick to your computer/notebook so you do not have to use the arrows and keyboard. That makes life much easier, just pay the $20 or so and get the darn controller. I should get a new one, after I get my PS4 btw.

IPL Player

look at the website it's all in persian.i don't think the would do that if they were outside iran.
i think one of the chars should say kiram dare mipoke in one of their scenes just to jazz up the sales.

Legionnaire

look at the website it's all in persian.i don't think the would do that if they were outside iran.
i think one of the chars should say kiram dare mipoke in one of their scenes just to jazz up the sales.

The website might be in Persian but you can still have the game made outside of Iran and just have someone put the Persian/Farsi on the website. However, you could be right we don't know because we did not make the game. It looks like a pretty cool shooter game though.